... to peruse the left-wing reaction to Padilla's conviction.

I expected, at FireDogLake, the exact inverse of their cheering for the Scooter Libby verdict. (After all, any good American would cheer for the capture and conviction of that dangerous terrorist Scooter Libby, and would likewise cheer to free that great freedom fighter for justice, Abdullah Al-Muhajir, f/k/a Jose Padilla. Right?)

Well, that's sort of easy pickings at FDL.

I really wasn't prepared for the kind of weird, twisted, pro-Muhajir ravings on Salon's letters page. Salon's readership features some seriously sick puppies...

When Libby got convicted, I thought what I always do, that juries sometimes do stupid things and his conviction was one of the stupidest. So what are all the Salonistas proposing now? That the Muhajir jury was coerced into this conviction? That the Cheney Jackboots collared them all last night and demanded a conviction? That this federal judge is on the Bush payroll but that Libby's judge was not?

...I'd say, "Screw this! If they want to jerk us around on these tinfoil-hat allegations about our voting machines, forget it!" Why bother to invest, if they're not making anything out of it?

I don't see why I should care about touch-screen voting.

I do care about vote fraud, and so I am quite pleased with the President's emphasizing vote fraud investigation as a goal in the Justice Department. And I hope that more convictions come out of the many ACORN-related leftwing voter registration scandals.

And finally, I'm pleased that the left has wasted whatever time and resources they have on chasing the Diebold e-voting phantom. Makes no difference to me...

Yes, nauseating. It is the only word for a worldview that has Scooter Libby as a kind of facsist war criminal and Abdullah Al-Muhajir, f/k/a Jose Padilla, ex-Chicago gang member, turned terror-tourist, as a kind of paragon of freedom fighters for civil liberties.

But you know, if Al-Muhajir is the kind of hero and cause that the far left wants to hook up with candidates for U.S. elective offices (surely you guys must realize how far left you've gone, to the left of even the wackadoodle left, all the way the Hugo Chavez malignant-left), be my guest. The electorate will eat that one up. Can anyone please, please, promise me that the Clinton-Obama ticket will have a campaign platform plank to "Free Mumia Abu Jamal and Abdullah Al-Muhajir..."?

In the meantime, the United States Attorney General, in whose name this poor brown-skinned man was 'persecuted'? Uh, last time I checked, AG Alberto Gonzalez was also one of those brown-skinned men.

And harsh treatment of people in the war on terror? Guess what, folks, we're encountering some of them right now. And our troops don't read them their rights. They shoot them. Or call in an airstrike.

And when all of this occurs on the soil or in the airspace of the United States? No difference. If Muhajir had been one of the 9/11 hijackers, and if he had been in the air long enough, we know what his fate would have been, per the orders of the President and the Vice President; scramble fighters and shoot down the plane.

Anyway, I'm not going to get too excited over this. Muhajir is going to remain in custody, and if that makes everybody at FireDogLake unhappy, then that is just a bonus. And if it makes them even more unhappy that their other star defendant of 2007, Scooter Libby, will not be going to jail, so much the better.

What is the upside, policy-wise? There really is no use in attacking one of the President's daughters, other than to expose the basest level of your own venality. Maybe it was to let the more rabid of the Bush-hating Salonistas "vent."

But the risks are real, and manifest below. Letting the more surly Salonistas out of their cages to hurl epithets and unrepeatable insults at the President's daughter on the occasion of her engagement is probably not what the senior Salon editors are hoping for, lest they have to do too much "Cleanup on Aisle Decency."

Too late.

So, how are they coming, over at DailyKos, with policing the Jenna Bush hate-comments, that veer off from mere insult into quasi-criminal territory?

No checks, please! Just get 'em all jobs at the UN!

http://www.aim.org/media_monitor/A3548_0_2_0_C/

The only problem is, how overstaffed is the UN with prostitutes right now?